Londa Schiebinger

Forum Introduction: The European Colonial Science Complex

H istorians of science have, in the past several decades, boarded ships, like Christopher Columbus or Maria Sibylla Merian before them, and set sail for unknown destinations. Historical ventures to locales beyond the shores of Europe commingle with the ecumenical move toward global history. The colonial turn, as it might be styled, opens up standard accounts of Europe’s scientific revolution or “big science” to rich and new interpretation. One never sees European science quite the same again.1 This forum presents four all-too-brief historiographic essays on science considered from a colonial or imperial point of view. My charge to authors was to present a thematic discussion of work on this topic in their particular fields of expertise, to analyze new scholarly directions, and to pose questions that have not yet been asked or perhaps not yet completely formulated. The essays here treat globally, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, Iberian, British, and French colonial traditions and—to break the national paradigm—the multicultural Jesuit order.2 These essays are intended as helpful guides for those of us involved in writing about specific aspects of colonial science and for those of us who would like to incorporate more of these materials into our courses. I have chosen to call the forum the European Colonial Science Complex, even though Mark Harrison opens his essay with a reminder that historically “colonial science” has referred to science done in Europe’s overseas territories. Nonetheless, I retain the term “colonial science”; it is used here to mean any science done during the colonial era that involved Europeans working in a colonial context. This includes science done in Europe that drew on colonial resources in addition to science done in areas that were part of Europe’s trading or territorial empires.3 “Science,” in this context, serves as shorthand for systematic knowledge of nature and is used broadly in this forum even for natural history

Maria Winkelmann at the Berlin Academy: A Turning Point for Women in Science

E UROPEAN SCIENCE WAS in many ways a new enterprise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an enterprise that (at least ideologically) welcomed a broad participation. The regulations of the newly founded Berlin Academy stressed that modern science could flourish only with contributions from men of all social classes, nationalities, and religions.1 Was this ideological largess to be extended to women as well? After centuries of proscribing women from active participation, were centers of European intellectual life now to open their doors to them? The major European academies of science were founded in the seventeenth century-the Royal Society of London in 1662, the French Academie Royale des Sciences in 1666, and the Berlin Akademie der Wissenschaften in 1700.2 Women were not, however, to become regular members of these academies for three